June 29, 2007 “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them”*. James Baldwin’s well-known quotation aptly captures the essence of The Genographic Project – an ambitious five-year expedition through our genetic past that aims to understand where humans came from and how we got to where we are today. Eighteen months into the project, the first findings outlining the procedures used to analyze the genetic data from 78,590 public participants have been released. In the report published in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics, Doron Behar and colleagues also give the first anthropological insights into the emerging genetic map of human history.